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It costs the Drug Enforcement Administration 60 bucks to get rid of one of these plants in Oregon. (Jim Mone/AP)

The Drug Enforcement Administration spent $960,000 to destroy marijuana plants in that state in 2014 as part of its “Cannabis Eradication Program,” according to a recent report by NBC affiliate KGW in Portland, Ore.

The DEA has budgeted $760,000 in marijuana eradication funds for Oregon this year, according to KGW. Considering that marijuana is now legal in that state, many Oregonians — including some members of Congress — are questioning whether that’s a sensible endeavor. They are trying to defund the federal anti-pot program that costs about $18 million a year overall.

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Nancy Wake is relatively unknown by most Australians. In some ways, this is surprising considering that she was one of the most decorated soldiers of World War 2 and played such a significant role in the Allied resistance to German occupation that she topped the Gestapo’s most wanted list. It might be expected that Australian war historians would be keen to raise awareness of such a positive role model.

Aside from being a decorated soldier, Wake was a pioneering feminist who spoke loudly with her words and then backed them up with her actions. She once said,

“I hate wars and violence, but if they come I don’t see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas.”

With many high school textbook writers desperate to provide gender balance to Australia’s war lessons, and many feminist academics promoting an ideal of gender opportunity, it might again be expected that they would want to affirm support for a positive role model. Why they haven’t reveals something about the political nature of Australian history writing.

Hitler’s most wanted

Nancy Wake had a difficult childhood growing up in Sydney. Her mother was a dogmatically strict religious woman. Her father was a journalist who went to live in New Zealand to make a movie about Maoris. He sold the family home and never came back, resulting in his family being evicted. An unreliable father and an oppressively strict mother seemed to breed a rebellious streak in Nancy.

In 1928, at the age of 16, Nancy commenced work as a nurse. In 1932, she inherited some money and immediately used it to travel to London and then onto mainland Europe to train and work as a journalist. One of her early assignments was to interview Adolph Hitler. In the same year, she visited Vienna and witnessed the impact of the Nazi regime first hand. She later recounted,

“The stormtroopers had tied the Jewish people up to massive wheels. They were rolling the wheels along, and the stormtroopers were whipping the Jews. I stood there and thought, ‘I don’t know what I’ll do about it, but if I can do anything one day, I’ll do it.’ And I always had that picture in my mind, all through the war.”
continue http://www.convictcreations.com/history/nancywake.htm

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Benjamin Yoho, 41, has received a six-month sentence behind bars when a jury established that he was guilty of littering a large area of Uncompahgre National Forest north of Telluride.

John Walsh, the Colorado U.S. Attorney stated that “This case is no ordinary case of littering in the National Forest — it is a full-scale trashing of the communal lands and deserved a term of imprisonment.”

Prosecutors have informed the judge that Yoho erected an illegal home and discarded nearly 8,500 pounds of garbage in the forest from October, 2014, to April.

The litter mostly involved recycled bits and pieces from the Telluride “Free Box,” the station reported.

During the month of May forty eight volunteers and crew members from the State of Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control swiped the area and removed the debris from the forest by helicopter.

The issued jail sentence includes probation for one year after Yoho gets out of prison. Yoho’s probation conditions comprises the relocation in a halfway house upon release and a bar from the National Forest and Bureau of Land Management lands. The court urged that Yoho receive mental health treatment while he serves his sentence.

In the last few years, FBI has been dramatically expanding its biometrics programs, whether by adding face recognition to its vast Next Generation Identification (NGI) database or pushing out mobile biometrics capabilities for “time-critical situations” through its Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC). But two new developments—both introduced with next to no media attention—will impact far more every-day Americans than anything the FBI has done on biometrics in the past.
FBI Combines Civil and Criminal Fingerprints into One Fully Searchable Database

Being a job seeker isn’t a crime. But the FBI has made a big change in how it deals with fingerprints that might make it seem that way. For the first time, fingerprints and biographical information sent to the FBI for a background check will be stored and searched right along with fingerprints taken for criminal purposes.

The change, which the FBI revealed quietly in a February 2015 Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), means that if you ever have your fingerprints taken for licensing or for a background check, they will most likely end up living indefinitely in the FBI’s NGI database. They’ll be searched thousands of times a day by law enforcement agencies across the country—even if your prints didn’t match any criminal records when they were first submitted to the system.

This is the first time the FBI has allowed routine criminal searches of its civil fingerprint data. Although employers and certifying agencies have submitted prints to the FBI for decades, the FBI says it rarely retained these non-criminal prints. And even when it did retain prints in the past, they “were not readily accessible or searchable.” Now, not only will these prints—and the biographical data included with them—be available to any law enforcement agent who wants to look for them, they will be searched as a matter of course along with all prints collected for a clearly criminal purpose (like upon arrest or at time of booking).

This seems part of an ever-growing movement toward cataloguing information on everyone in America—and a movement that won’t end with fingerprints. With the launch of the face recognition component of NGI, employers and agencies will be able to submit a photograph along with prints as part of the standard background check. As we’ve noted before, one of FBI’s stated goals for NGI is to be able to track people as they move from one location to another. Having a robust database of face photos, built out using non-criminal records, will only make that goal even easier to achieve.

This change will impact a broad swath of Americans. It’s not just prospective police officers or childcare workers who have to submit to fingerprint background checks. In Texas, for example, you’ll need to give the government your prints if you want to be an engineer, doctor, realtor, stockbroker, attorney, or even an architect. The California Department of Justice says it submits 1.2 million sets of civil prints to the FBI annually. And, since 1953, all jobs with the federal government have required a fingerprint check—not just for jobs requiring a security clearance, but even for part-time food service workers, student interns, designers, customer service representatives, and maintenance workers.

The FBI seems to think we should all be OK with this because it has (ostensibly) given people notice and because the program is limited to only those people who are required by federal or state rules to provide prints. But in many parts of the country, this could amount to a very large percentage of workers (including each and every attorney at EFF)—and for many people, especially the poor and underemployed, opting out of this program by choosing a different line of work is truly a not a choice at all.

This is not OK. The government should not collect information on Americans for a non-criminal purpose and then use that same information for criminal purposes—in effect submitting the data of Americans with no ties to the criminal justice system to thousands of criminal searches every day. This violates our democratic ideals and our societal belief that we should not treat people as criminals until they are proven guilty.

It also subjects innocent Americans to the very real risk that they will be falsely linked to a crime. In 2004, the FBI mistakenly linked American attorney Brandon Mayfield to a bombing in Madrid based solely on forensic fingerprint evidence. The FBI seized his property, and he was imprisoned for two weeks before agents finally recognized their error and apologized. Researchers have postulated large face recognition databases could also result in false matches. This means that many people will be presented as suspects for crimes they didn’t commit.

Unfortunately, individuals don’t have much recourse. The only way you can get your prints out of the FBI’s database and stop this repeated invasion of privacy is either with a court order or if the agency that requires your prints to be collected also requests for them to be removed. There appears to be no way for an individual to ask to have their prints removed on their own.

We are disappointed that the FBI chose to go down this path. It could just as easily have designed its database to keep non-criminal data separate from criminal data. Or even better, the FBI could go back to its old practices and not keep the data at all.
FBI Plans to Populate its Massive Face Recognition Database with Photographs Taken in the Field

As Privacy SOS reported earlier this month, the FBI is looking for new ways to collect biometrics out in the field—and not just fingerprints, but face recognition-ready photographs as well.

The FBI recently issued a request for quotations (RFQ) to build out its mobile biometrics capabilities. Specifically, it’s looking for software that can be used on small Android-based mobile devices like Samsung Galaxy phones and tablets to collect fingerprints and face images from anyone officers stop on the street.

If the plan goes through, it will be the first time the FBI will be able to collect fingerprints and face images out in the field and search them against its Next Generation Identification (NGI) database. According to the RFQ, FBI’s current mobile collection tools are “not optimized for mobile operations” because they are large and are limited in scope to determining if a person has “possible terrorist links (in the U.S. or abroad) or is likely to pose a threat to the U.S.”

This plan appears to be a broad expansion of the FBI’s “RISC” program. RISC provides mobile fingerprinting tools to determine whether someone is an “Individual of Special Concern” by allowing access in the field to a database of “wanted persons, known or appropriately suspected terrorists, sex offenders, and persons of special interest.” The FBI says RISC is intended for “time-critical situations” and to identify a limited subset of people within its criminal fingerprint database. But now it appears FBI intends to use its mobile biometrics collection tools much more broadly.

The biggest concern with this new mobile program is that it appears it will allow (and in fact, encourage) agents to collect face recognition images out in the field and use these images to populate NGI—something the FBI stated in Congressional testimony it would not do.

Only criminal mug shot photos are used to populate the national repository. Query photos and photos obtained from social networking sites, surveillance cameras, and similar sources are not used to populate the national repository.

But the new RFQ contradicts this because it appears the desired software would allow officers to submit non-mug shot photos to NGI. The RFQ says the FBI is looking for a mobile biometrics tool that would, “at a minimum . . . include fingerprints and facial photographs for submission and receipt of a response.” Photographs taken in the field are clearly not “mug shot photos” because they’re taken before booking and possibly even before arrest. And it’s hard to see how a mobile tool that allows officers to collect these non-mug shot photos and “submit” them to a database is not also “populating the national repository.”

Unfortunately, as we have noted many times before, we don’t know exactly how the FBI plans to populate NGI with face images because it hasn’t updated the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) for its photo database since 2008—well before the development and deployment of NGI’s facial recognition capabilities. Mr. Pender testified to Congress in 2012 that FBI was in the process of updating this PIA to “address all evolutionary changes” since 2008. But despite a 2014 letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder signed by EFF and 31 other organizations calling for FBI to update the PIA, the Bureau still fails to explain to Americans exactly how it plans to collect, use and protect face recognition data. Our calls for an updated PIA are clearly falling on deaf ears. But without one, it is impossible to tell exactly how the FBI is limiting its acquisition and use of facial recognition data now and in the future.

As EFF testified during a Senate Subcommittee hearing on facial recognition, Americans should be very concerned about the government’s plans to build up its facial recognition capabilities:

Facial recognition takes the risks inherent in other biometrics to a new level…[it] allows for covert, remote, and mass capture and identification of images, and the photos that may end up in a database include not just a person’s face but also what she is wearing, what she might be carrying, and who she is associated with.

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A group of people convicted of crimes in Orleans Parish lodged a federal class-action lawsuit Thursday claiming that the dozen judges of Orleans Parish Criminal District Court and court staffers routinely break the law by issuing arrest warrants for a failure to pay court fines without a chance for them to plead poverty.

“The result is an illegal, unconstitutional and unjust modern debtors’ prison,” the complaint says.

The civil rights lawsuit claims the court has authorized illegal arrest warrants leading to jail time for failing to come up with the money, with no “notice of how or when they would be released or when a hearing would be held.” It claims that the six named plaintiffs, and others like them, are deprived of a constitutionally mandated hearing on their ability to pay.

The complaint describes an “illegal scheme” in which convicts are jailed until they pay their fines and fees or a preset $20,000 bond. The suit claims the judges have a conflict of interest in doing so, because that money goes into the court’s Judicial Expense Fund.

The decades-old practice in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court violates the Fourth and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the suit claims.

“The environment of threats of jail and actual jailing creates a culture of fear among indigent people and their families, who borrow money at high interest rates, divert money from food for their children, and cash their family members’ disability checks in a desperate attempt to … avoid indefinite confinement,” the lawsuit says.

New Orleans is not the only jurisdiction hit with similar allegations or lawsuits. Courts and law enforcement agencies around the country are facing questions about whether they have strayed from the mission of delivering justice and now focus too much on squeezing revenue out of poor defendants.

Earlier this year, a scathing report from the U.S. Justice Department concluded that the municipal court system in Ferguson, Missouri, “primarily uses its judicial authority as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the city’s financial interests.”

The lawsuit filed Thursday takes a broad swipe at the criminal justice system in New Orleans. Named as defendants in the case, along with the judges and the court, are the city, Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman, Clerk of Criminal Court Arthur Morrell, court Judicial Administrator Rob Kazik and Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell.

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Adam Jones of Skegness, England was given a year jail sentence for “aggravated vehicle taking and driving without a license or insurance” after leading police on a 100mph chase that damaged countless cars. After he was caught, Jones reportedly told authorities that his driver’s education consisted of playing Playstation driving games.

“You said you ‘Only learnt to drive on a Playstation game,” the judge told Jones. “You were driving like a Playstation game. You drove as fast as you could as if in a video or playstation game without any care for those around you.”

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Computers are generally very poor timekeepers. They rely on low-cost timing components that are widely used in general-purpose clocks and watches and are just as prone to drift. The real-time clocks and cheap crystal oscillators integrated on to PC boards can cause system time to drift by several minutes each day. However, there are software solutions on hand to correct time drift and maintain accurate system time on your computer. This article describes techniques that can be used to eliminate system clock drift and keep precise time on your computer and across your network. It describes how Internet based time servers and the NTP time protocol can be used to keep accurate synchronized time on your computer.

There are a large number of Internet based time references that use the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to synchronize time clients. NTP was developed over twenty-five years ago at the University of Delaware by Dr D. Mills, it remains one of the oldest protocols in constant use. The protocol was developed to provide accurate synchronization of time between time servers and clients. Internet based NTP servers synchronize their time to accurate external reference clocks, such as GPS, national radio time standards or precise atomic clocks. Accurate time is then passed from the NTP server to network clients for synchronization.

An engineless glider could soon soar above the lofty heights reached by the legendary U-2 and the SR-71 spyplanes. But first it needs to do a few test flights. On Wednesday, for the first time, the aviation nonprofit Perlan Project will fly their glider, the Perlan 2. The test flight comes in preparation for an eventual flight at 90,000 feet above the Earth, where the air is thin and its influence on the weather below is little-studied.

In order to fly, an airplane usually needs, well, air to fly through. The glider, built by volunteers and supported by aviation companies including Airbus, will instead fly through rarefied air. Only a few aircraft have ever flown so high, and most of the ones that did were rocket-powered. In balloons, humans like Felix Baumgartner have ridden that far and higher before plummeting to Earth. The current world record for glider altitude is just 50,721 feet.

The Perlan 2 has an 84-foot wingspan, 2 crew members, and weighs just 1,800 pounds when crewed and loaded up for the mission. Its first flight will be modest: pulled behind another plane, it will reach 5,000 feet above ground and then be released, testing turning maneuvers before circling down to a landing at Redmond Municipal Airport in Redmond, Oregon.

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“He (Pope Francis) comes out of that traditional Franciscan ethos which is “the closer you are to the poor, the closer you are to God”. That is a particular, he’s a Jesuit, but that is a particular theological strain within the Catholic church and I think that very much describes where he is coming from. So, uh, reading between the lines, he’s asking for a kinder gentler system, for people to take into account the suffering global capitalism has inflicted by lifting up the voices of the poor. In the end, as far as I can tell, it’s about charity, it’s not about justice… he’s critiquing the excesses of the system and no where does he critique the system itself.’ Chris Hedges
read transcript http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14779

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The key to the digital future is about data integrity, not data confidentiality.

So says Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia, who flew into San Francisco Thursday morning to address an internet summit hosted by CloudFlare.

“I have AB blood,” he said by way of example. “I don’t particularly care that people know that. But if somehow that information was changed, well then I could end up dead.”

Estonia has become somewhat of a digital poster child in recent years thanks to its embrace of internet technology, including the creation of an “e-resident” system where anyone can become a digital resident of the small country, open a bank account and sign legal documents electronically.

That drive has in large part come from Ilves himself, who talked briefly about how he learned to code while at university. “I had a system with 8K of memory,” he recalled, “which I guess is the size of an empty email.”

Ilves spoke knowledgeably about a whole range of tech issues, something that an earlier panel at the summit noted was a rare occurrence: being a politician and being tech-savvy tend to be mutually exclusive.

Estonia has introduced a unique system where the government servers are all connected to one another and every citizen is provided with a chipped card that allows them to access the network.

To make it work, the country has passed a number of laws. “We have a law that says you own your own data,” Ilves explained. “And you can see who has tried to access your data.” He was no different, he said: “Every day, I see the newspapers looking at my financial records. They haven’t found anything yet.”

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Facebook has a new little known software that monitors your profile chat and pictures for criminal activity. The software will proceed to alert an employee at the company who will then decide whether to call authorities or not.

The software will monitor individuals who have a ‘loose’ relationship on social media networks, according to an interview with Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan.

Reuters interview with the security officer explains, Facebook’s software focuses on conversations between members who have a loose relationship on the social network. For example, if two users aren’t friends, only recently became friends, have no mutual friends, interact with each other very little, have a significant age difference, and/or are located far from each other, the tool pays particular attention.

“We’ve never wanted to set up an environment where we have employees looking at private communications, so it’s really important that we use technology that has a very low false-positive rate,” Sullivan told Reuters.

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Before Danny Diaz was brought on to manage Jeb Bush’s presidential bid, he waged a different state-by-state campaign: helping the pharmaceutical industry keep cough medicine used in homegrown meth labs available to customers through over-the-counter purchases.

FP1 Strategies, a company co-founded by Diaz, has been touted in the media as an A-list campaign consulting firm retained to elect an array of GOP politicians. But Diaz and his firm have also been involved in a range of behind-the-scenes lobbying battles on behalf of business interests. Records show, for instance, that his firm has been engaged to defend genetically modified foods and to wage a public relations war against farmworkers and other low-income workers agitating for better wages.

In 2011, legislators in West Virginia, one of the states hardest hit by methamphetamine addiction, set out to return decongestant pseudoephedrine (PSE) cold medicines to prescription-only status. Those include Claritin-D, Allegra-D and Zyrtec-D. It was a positionfavored by public health advocates, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and local law enforcement agencies.

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While violence among citizens has dropped, violence against citizens carried out by police has been rising sharply.

According to new FBI statistics released this week, violent crime rates in the US fell over 4% in the past year alone, bringing the amount of violent crimes lower than it has been in nearly 40 years. The statistics showed that there were an estimated 1.16 million violent crimes in the year of 2013, which is the lowest number since 1978, when 1.09 million were recorded.

Broken down, the report revealed that manslaughter dropped by 4.4% to 14,196, the lowest rate since 1968, while instances of rape were down 6.3%. Despite the tough economic times, robbery is also down by 2.8% and property crimes were down by 4.1%.

The violent crime rate has been steadily declining since 1994, but the prison population has continued to increase over the decades. There are currently over two and a half million people imprisoned in the US, which is by far the largest prison population in the world.

However, a study recently published by Pew Charitable Trusts showed that for the first time in decades, the US prison population is actually on a decline. Their research found that the drop in crime that was seen in 2013 actually coincided with a decline in the prison population. According to their data, the amount of people in the US prison system peaked in 2008, and has since dropped 6%.

The study also found that there was a drop in the amount of prisoners in 32 of the 50 states, while imprisonment continued to rise in the other 18 states. California showed the largest drop in crime and imprisonment over the past five years, which is likely connected to lighter drug penalties that have been adopted in recent years.

Even among those who are technically “guilty” of breaking some law, a vast majority of prisoners are nonviolent offenders who don’t belong in prison to begin with. According to some statistics, nonviolent offenders make up nearly 70% of the prison population, many of these people are not guilty of any transgression, and they are in fact themselves victims of state violence.

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YouTube, which spent the first 10 years of its life as a free service, is getting ready to start selling tickets.

Google’s video site appears to be finalizing launch plans for its long-in-the-making subscription service, and industry sources say they’ve been told to expect a launch near the end of October.

A blast email from YouTube to content owners, telling them they have to agree to new terms by Oct. 22 or their “videos will no longer be available for public display or monetization in the United States,” helps support that timeline.

Note that we’re referring to a single service, not multiple ones. Sources say that’s because YouTube intends to bundle two different services into one offering: An update of its music service, which it launched in beta as YouTube Music Key last fall, and another service, yet to launch, that will give users the ability to watch anything on YouTube without seeing ads.

Video industry sources say Google has told them it intends to charge $10 a month for the combined offering. It’s hard to imagine how YouTube will make money at that pricing, since its music service was supposed to cost $10 on its own, with the music labels and other copyright owners pocketing the majority of that.

A YouTube rep declined to comment beyond an amended version of a statement the company has offered in the past: “We are progressing according to plan to provide fans more options in how they enjoy content on YouTube. We have support from the overwhelming majority of our partners, with over 95 percent of YouTube watch-time covered by agreements, and more in the pipeline about to close.​” In July, when the company offered up a similar statement, it said it had signed up content owners that represented more than 90 percent of YouTube viewing.

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Popular Science reported on Wednesday on a bill called the Space Act of 2015 that has passed the House and may soon pass the Senate that will allow private companies to own the natural resources that they mine in space. The idea would seem to be a no-brainer. However, the bill is causing some heartburn among some space law experts, especially in other countries. Fabio Tronchetti, a lawyer at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, argues that the law would violate the Outer Space Treaty. He seems to be on thin ice in that assessment, however.

Tronchetti contends that the bill violates the Outer Space Treaty, which forbids the establishment of national sovereignty on other worlds. The idea is that the bill would confer such sovereignty to private companies, something that the United States lacks the power to do. Keith Cowing of NASA Watch echoes that sentiment and the misunderstanding of the Outer Space Treaty and the Space Act of 2015.

The Outer Space Treaty is silent about private entities claiming ownership of celestial bodies. As a practical matter, a private company would lack the ability to enforce such a claim without a national government backing it up if some other entity chooses to dispute it.

However, the Space Act of 2015 does not confer ownership of asteroids or even parts of the moon to private companies. All it does is that in confirms that the resources extracted in space become the property of such companies, really a prerequisite for starting a space mining industry to start with.

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69-year-old Douglas G. Williams of Norman, Oklahoma was sentenced to two years in prison this week for running a website that pointed out the flaws in lie detector tests. Williams is a former detective for the Oklahoma City Police Department and throughout the course of his career he administered thousands of polygraph tests for his own police department, as well as other agencies like the FBI and the Secret Service. Through his experience, Williams learned that a polygraph is not a valid way of truly figuring out whether or notsomeone is lying. In 1979, he invented “the sting technique,” which polygraph experts now refer to as “countermeasures.”

He wrote the first manual teaching people how to pass a polygraph test, which was initially published in 1979 and according to him, was one of the very first e-books available on the Internet.

The U.S. Department Of Justice issued a press release this week stating they planted federal agents to pose as customers and entrap Williams in schemes to help the agents cheat on polygraph tests.

The Supreme Court, in its Citizens United decision, ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts in elections. Now politicians in Kentucky are claiming they have a Constitutional right to receive gifts from lobbyists.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Republican Kentucky state Sen. John Schickel, along with two Libertarian political candidates, are suing to overturn state ethics laws, claiming that the campaign contribution limit of $1,000 and a ban on gifts from lobbyists and their employers are a violation of their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The lawsuit notes that lobbyists and the employers of lobbyists are prohibited by Kentucky law from inviting legislators to parties, offering gifts, or paying for food for legislators. “This infringes on the legislator’s, lobbyist’s, and employer of lobbyist’s right to freedom of association, and freedom of speech,” Schickel claims in the suit.

But if the federal authorities in the US want to see the contents of your phone in the old fashioned way – by asking you your password – they won’t get any help from the judicial system.

So says Judge Mark Kearney of the federal district court in Eastern Pennsylvania who recently ruled that passcodes on all such smartphones are protected by the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution.

The ruling came as an insider trading case between the Securities and Exchange Commission and two ex-employees of credit card company Capital One drew to a conclusion on Wednesday.

The two men in question – Bonan Huang and Nan Huang – were charged with illegal insider trading. They are said to have used their positions as data analysts – along with privileged information about consumer retail corporations – to make stock market bets on as many as 170 companies, turning an initial $150,000 investment into $2.8 million via illegal profiteering.

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Are your children safe at school? That depends on if you’re worried about bullies or administrators. Here are 10 of the most infamous “zero tolerance” punishments handed down to kids—and even some adults—this year.

A 13-year-old boy at Weaverville Elementary School in California shared his school lunch (a chicken burrito) with a hungry friend. For this, he got detention. Superintendent Tom Barnett explained, “Because of safety and liability we cannot allow students to actually exchange meals.”

A San Antonio, Texas, school forbid students to bring sunscreen on a field trip. Why? According to spokeswoman Aubrey Chancellor, “We can’t allow toxic things to be in our schools.” The children, “could possibly have an allergic reaction (or) they could ingest it. It’s really a dangerous situation.”

A letter home from the Harley Avenue Primary School in Elwood, New York, read, in part: “The reason for eliminating the Kindergarten show is simple. We are responsible for preparing children for college and career with valuable lifelong skills and know that we can best do that by having them become strong readers, writers, coworkers and problem solvers.”

A second grade teacher at Chicago’s Washington Irving Elementary School was suspended for four days without pay for bringing screwdrivers, wrenches and other shop tools to class, and demonstrating how to use them. These are dangerous items.

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The shadowy Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has appointed its first “friend of the court” to add an outsider’s perspective to the highly secretive process of approving surveillance requests from the government.

Preston Burton, a criminal defense attorney known for his work with accused spies, is the first of at least five amici curiae the court must appoint due to a provision in the USA Freedom Act, the surveillance-reform legislative package passed in June.

Groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology had pressed Congress to include language about amici, or independent experts, to provide the court with unbiased understanding of the complex technical and civil-liberty issues that come before it.

The role of the amici is fairly limited, however. They will only be brought in on “certain matters” that may present “a novel or significant interpretation of the law.” The FISA Court does not necessarily have to share classified information with the amici, and has the authority to determine whether or not information they present is “relevant.”

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Los Angeles says it will declare a state of emergency to deal with … homelessness. Mayor Eric Garcetti and city council made the announcement yesterday, noting $100 million will be set aside to help the 26,000 living on the city’s streets, up 12% since 2013, reports the Los Angeles Times. It followed a decree a day earlier outlining $13 million to be used for short-term housing initiatives, reports the AP. “It’s time to get real, because this is literally a matter of life and death,” says a councilor, who describes a “collective failure of every level of government to deal with what has been a homeless crisis for generations and is exploding and exacerbating now.” Though the measure still needs to be voted on, some say the money could help ease restrictions on churches and nonprofits that shelter the homeless and cut red tape to allow faster building of affordable housing.

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Trenton, NJ — In 2009, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that police could only violate your 4th Amendment rights by warrantlessly searching you, if they prove two key factors first. Those two key factors, or two-pronged test, required both probable cause and a reason to believe evidence might disappear, or the safety of the officer or public would be at risk if the search were delayed to obtain a warrant.

However, on Thursday, the court overturned its meager rights-protecting decision from 2009. In an ominous 5-2 decision, the state Supreme Court gave police even more power and opportunity to violate the rights of the citizens.

The court’s decision stemmed from a case in which a Salem County man was found with an ‘illegal’ handgun after he was pulled over for his headlights being too bright.

William L. Witt was pulled over on Route 48 in Carneys Point in December 2012 after he approached a police officer with his high beams on and “failed to dim” as he passed. After speaking with Witt, the officer concluded he was intoxicated, performed a field sobriety test and placed him under arrest, according to NJ.com.

After arresting Witt for an alleged DUI, police officers then illegally searched his car without a warrant and without Witt’s consent. During this unlawful search, police found an unregistered handgun.

Citing the 2009 decision, Witt fought to suppress the fact that he merely wanted to protect himself with a handgun by claiming that the police performed an unreasonable search in violation of the state and federal constitutions.

In May of 2014, New Jersey officials, still showing some semblance of protecting the rights of the people, ruled that the officer did not meet the “exigent circumstances” needed to violate the rights of Witt.

However, that constitutional decision would be short-lived. On Thursday, police were give the authority to search a vehicle without a warrant if they have probable cause to believe there is contraband or evidence of a crime as long as the circumstances that led to the probable cause are unforeseeable and spontaneous.

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Traffic is for sale. You can buy “good” traffic and “bad” traffic. But much of it is, as they say, “nonhuman”—and amounts to the normalization of click fraud on an epic scale.

During the interview, [“Boris”] freely admits he buys many of the visitors to his websites. He spends about $50,000 per year buying high-quality traffic … Bloomberg Businessweek asked two traffic-fraud-detection firms to assess recent traffic to MyTopFace; they agreed on the condition that their names not be used. One found that 94 percent of 30,000 visitors were bots; the other put the bot traffic at 74 percent.

Climate changes in flower diversity have resulted in a decrease in the length of alpine bumble bees’ tongues. This surprising observation is preventing the bumble bees to feed from and pollinate the flowers with deep blossoms.

Recent studies suggest that long-tongued bumble bees are declining in number. Researcher Nicole Miller-Struthman et al. went on a mission to find out why this is the case.

She visited high-altitude sites in Colorado where two species of long-tongued alpine bumble bee have their habitat.

Miller-Struthman was comparing bumble bee specimens that have been collected from 1966 through 1980, and from 2012 through 2014

Comparing the length of the tongues revealed that today’s bumble bees have significant shorter ones.

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The technology powering the devices potentially could identify the user’s walking style, for example. Officials would be alerted if the gait does not match the authorized user’s walk – a red flag the phone might have fallen into the wrong hands, officials said.

The “secret sauce” of the mobile device is a so-called neuromorphic computer chip that simulates human learning, Vincent Sritapan, the program manager for DHS’ mobile device security program, told Nextgov.

Boeing and HRL Laboratories, a software firm jointly owned by Boeing and General Motors, are partnering under a DHS project worth $2.2 million over 2.5 years.

The companies “pretty much are leveraging user behavior information” from data gathered by sensors found on any standard consumer smartphone, Sritapan said. Those feelers could include microphones, cameras and touchpads, he added. The artificial intelligence could help agencies determine, “Are you who you say you are, and do we give you access to enterprise resources like email?” he said.

Homeland Security chose the Boeing Black for experimentation, because the company was willing to embed the chip into its device, Sritapan said.

“I would call this a high-risk, high-reward type of project,” he added. “If successful, this technology can go into any device the manufacturers are willing to integrate it with” and would meet military, DHS and other federal agency information security specifications.

Referring to the Black as “the test body,” he said the government purchased the brand for “specific uses,” such as secure voice calls.

Smartphone as Test Tube

It remains to be seen whether DHS itself will buy brain chip-embedded Blacks for operations in the field. If the chip is successful at the end of a 2-year research and development period, DHS and Boeing will share the cost of a 6-month pilot program, Sritapan said.

State Department staffers apparently plan to or are currently using the Black.

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George Soros wants Europe to do a lot more for the refugees, asylum-seekers, and migrants mass-exodus-ing from The Middle East. As he writes in a Project Syndicate op-ed, The European Union needs to accept responsibility for the lack of a common asylum policy, which has transformed this year’s growing influx of refugees from a manageable problem into yet another political crisis.

Each member state has selfishly focused on its own interests, often acting against the interests of others. This precipitated panic among asylum seekers, the general public, and the authorities responsible for law and order. Asylum seekers have been the main victims.

The EU needs a comprehensive plan to respond to the crisis, one that reasserts effective governance over the flows of asylum-seekers so that they take place in a safe, orderly way, and at a pace that reflects Europe’s capacity to absorb them. To be comprehensive, the plan has to extend beyond the borders of Europe. It is less disruptive and much less expensive to maintain potential asylum-seekers in or close to their present location.

As the origin of the current crisis is Syria, the fate of the Syrian population has to be the first priority. But other asylum seekers and migrants must not be forgotten. Similarly, a European plan must be accompanied by a global response, under the authority of the United Nations and involving its member states. This would distribute the burden of the Syrian crisis over a larger number of states, while also establishing global standards for dealing with the problems of forced migration more generally.

Here are the six components of a comprehensive plan.

First, the EU has to accept at least a million asylum-seekers annually for the foreseeable future. And, to do that, it must share the burden fairly – a principle that a qualified majority finally established at last Wednesday’s summit.

Adequate financing is critical. The EU should provide €15,000 ($16,800) per asylum-seeker for each of the first two years to help cover housing, health care, and education costs – and to make accepting refugees more appealing to member states. It can raise these funds by issuing long-term bonds using its largely untapped AAA borrowing capacity, which will have the added benefit of providing a justified fiscal stimulus to the European economy.

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Four-star General Ray Odierno retired from his position as U.S. Army chief of staff on Friday. Now, less than a week after mustering out, he’s cashing in. The former general has taken a job as a senior adviser to the investment firm JPMorgan Chase.

In a press release posted on JPMorgan’s website on Thursday, the firm announced that Odierno is joining the company in “a senior advisory capacity,” providing “strategic advice and global insights” to CEO Jamie Dimon as well as the company’s board of directors. The announcement also said Odierno “will represent JPMorgan Chase through engagement with clients, government officials and policy makers in the U.S. and internationally.”

Odierno, who led the U.S. 4th infantry division during the initial stages of the occupation of Iraq, has been criticized for the allegedly heavy-handed and brutal behavior he permitted as a commander. While troops under his command were credited with the capture of Saddam Hussein, they were also criticized for their extremely harsh tactics in dealing with the local population. In Thomas Ricks’ 2006 book Fiasco, Odierno was characterized as helping enable indiscriminate mass detentions, prisoner abuse, and extrajudicial killings of Iraqi civilians in the area under his control.

In one particularly brutal 2003 incident documented in the book, Odierno overruled a recommendation that a soldier under his command be court-martialed for the killing of a Iraqi detainee who had turned himself in to U.S. forces, saying that the soldier accused of the murder was “a cook, he didn’t get proper training,” and that the detainee was “very aggressive, a bad guy.” The detainee, an Iraqi man named Obeed Radad, had turned himself in to U.S. forces after learning that they had been looking for him. He was shot and killed while being held in an isolation cell at a U.S. detention center in Tikrit, after allegedly trying to escape through a barbed wire fence.

At the request of his probation officer, Tyrone C. Brown came to a community auditorium here in June and sat alongside about 30 other mostly young black men with criminal records — men who were being watched closely by the police, just as he was.

He expected to hear an admonition from law enforcement officials to help end violence in the community. But Mr. Brown, 29, got more than he had bargained for. A police captain presented a slide show featuring mug shots of people they were cracking down on. Up popped a picture of Mr. Brown linking him to a criminal group that had been implicated in a homicide.

“I was disturbed,” said Mr. Brown, who acknowledges having been involved in crime but denied that he had ever been involved in a killing.

That discomfort was just the reaction the authorities were after.

Mr. Brown, whose criminal record includes drug and assault charges, is at the center of an experiment taking place in dozens of police departments across the country, one in which the authorities have turned to complex computer algorithms to try to pinpoint the people most likely to be involved in future violent crimes — as either predator or prey. The goal is to do all they can to prevent the crime from happening.

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In a bid to fulfil his childhood dream of flying a plane, an Ethiopian man has taught himself how to build one mainly by reading aviation books and watching YouTube tutorials!

Public Health Officer and Ethiopian Airlines Aviation Academy reject Asmelash Zerefu set about learning to build his own aircraft over a decade ago. It was a daunting challenge, but he has managed to achieve the unthinkable – he single-handedly constructed Ethiopia’s first ever home-built aircraft from scratch.

“I call it the K-570A,” he said. “K representing my mother’s initial of her name, Kiros, and 570 signifying the number of days it took me to complete my aircraft. And A is for Aircraft.”

Zerefu’s social media profile is proof enough of his obsession with aviation – it is full with pictures of his own attempts and failures, and praise for his heroes, the Wright Brothers. His only goal since childhood was to become a pilot, so despite his high GPA, he dropped out of university to join the Ethiopian Airlines Aviation Academy about 15 years ago. Sadly, he was turned down because he was one centimeter short of the minimum height requirement.

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Rep. Rick Nolan (D-Minn.) introduced a bill Friday that would prevent members of Congress from getting paid in the event of a government shutdown.

“It’s time to put an end to government by crisis management,” Nolan said in a statement. “And it’s time for Congress to start living in the real world — where you either do your job — or you don’t get paid. If hundreds of thousands of other federal employees are to go without their salaries — twisting slowly in the wind in a government shutdown — then the Congress should not be paid either.”

Under Nolan’s bill, members of Congress would go unpaid for the duration of the shutdown. He introduced similar legislation during the 16-day government shutdown in 2013 that left 800,000 federal workers furloughed without pay. While his bill never got off the ground, Nolan donated the money he was paid over the shutdown to charities in his district.

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American soldiers are being punished for blowing the whistle on the systematic rape and enslavement of young boys at the hands of brutal Afghan Muslim military officials.

Honorable men in uniform risked their careers and lives to stop the abuse. Yet, the White House — which was busy tweeting about its new feminism-pandering “It’s On Us” campaign against an alleged college rape crisis based on debunked statistics — is AWOL on the actual pedophilia epidemic known as “bacha bazi.” On Thursday, Obama administration flacks went out of their way to downplay Afghan child rape as “abhorrent,” but “fundamentally” a local “law enforcement matter.”
continue http://www.westernjournalism.com/bacha-bazi-obamas-silence-on-afghan-militarys-child-rape/

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The amount of cyanide solution that spilled from Barrick Gold’s Veladero mine in San Juan province is almost five times more than previously believed, the company acknowledged yesterday as a second federal prosecutor moved to investigate national and provincial officials and mining executives amid growing environmental concerns.

By Barrick’s own estimates, approximately 1,072 cubic metres (1.072 million litres) of cyanide solution made it into the Potrerillos River, due to a valve failure and a sluice gate being left open on September 12.

Previous upper estimates of the spill had been in the realm of 224,000 litres. The Canadian multinational chalked up the revised number to the pinpointing of the approximate time of the valve failure, believed to be around 8pm. The cyanide solution is used to leach gold from processed rocks, a common method for the extraction of gold from ore.

Despite the revised estimate, Barrick insists the spill will not lead to any health risks for area residents.

As a reference to understand the magnitude of the spill, Olympic-sized swimming pools have a volume of 2.5 million litres.

Cyanide leaching operations have been put on hold due to a judge’s order since the spill,and the company is currently in the process of carrying out upgrades to the mine to ensure that another spill does not take place.

Thermobaric rockets are a “fuel-air” weapon system. When fired, the rockets disperse a cloud of flammable liquid into the air around the target, and then ignite it.

“The results are devastating — not only is the explosion significantly longer and the shockwave significantly hotter and stronger than a conventional warhead, but all the oxygen in the near vicinity is also consumed, creating a partial vacuum. This makes them horrifying weapons to use against infantry and entrenched personnel in bunkers and caves—exactly what the TOS-1 was designed for,” Popular Mechanics noted.

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With global economic perceptions finally creeping toward financial perceptions (not stocks) despite the enormous and mostly ongoing “stimulus” almost everywhere, it is useful to review once more the assumed general mechanisms.

Step 1 is really the most basic and traditional element of central banking, as liquidity, broadly speaking here, is currency elasticity in its more modern format. Increasing liquidity is supposed to lead to Step 2, more credit/debt. Step 2 flows to Step 3, which is (hopefully) the bulk of that debt “creating” some real economy “demand.” Step 4 is where spending (demand), even if concentrated in certain parts of the economy (redistribution), leads to more jobs and productive investment which broadens out (“trickle out”) the redistributionary flow to the rest.

For the most part, central banks (including the Fed) are stuck on Step 1 almost a decade later. There has been some flow to Step 2 (credit) but it’s abundantly clear that an enormous proportion of that debt elevation has yielded very little toward Step 3, intead a great deal in fostering asset price inflation. Even if you argue that Step 3 has been yielded into the real economy to some limited extent, it is beyond dispute that it hasn’t led to Step 4.

When economists speak of “clogged transmission channels” this is the receiver of that ire; how Step 1 can be so successful yet not transmute into Step 2 and beyond has left economists and monetary policymakers exasperated (and stuck within themselves). The wholesale monetary system, by contrast, isn’t so certain about even liquidity, meaning that there isn’t even any real evidence to suggest that Step 1 has been completed. The most direct evidence offered about liquidity is only that there hasn’t been another panic, but that is an exceedingly low standard to the point of irrelevance. If monetary theory is to do what it proclaims, that is nowhere near enough (especially as even that minimal capacity is highly questionable again this year).

A great deal of focus in central banking has been trying to go beyond Step 1, to induce some form of bank “reserves” to become the bedrock association of traded flow toward debt creation. The Japanese have been here for a quarter century, with nearly all of this century so far spent within some QE or another with that common intent. The results in the real economy particularly since QQE/QE10 have been disastrous.